She inserted the visual log and instructed Shep to run it.
The wall over the sofa changed texture, the flatscreen appeared, and she was looking at the Hunter pilot’s room. A technician was working and his shoulder patch was visible:
ST. JOHNS MAINTENANCE.
The date, translated to Greenway time, was February 12, 573.
Specialists came and went, calibrating sensors, checking subspace communications, and performing a myriad other tasks.
The sequence was identical with her recollection of the version she had taken from the Archives. She fast-forwarded. The technicians raced through their tasks, then left, and the picture blinked. The timer leaped ahead more than two hours and Kane appeared.
She switched back to normal play. Kane turned and looked into the imager, directly out of the screen at Kim. His jaw was set, his mouth a thin line. He ran through a checklist, got out of his chair, and disappeared. The imager shut off. Sixteen minutes later, ship time, it blinked on again.
“Hunter ready to depart,” he told St. Johns control.
“Hunter, you are clear to go.”
Kane warned his passengers they were thirty seconds from departure, and his harness locked in place.
Kim watched it all again: The launch of the Hunter, Kane’s warning to Kile during the early minutes of the flight that the vessel would need a general overhaul when it got back, the jump to hyperspace. She watched the passengers come forward one by one and she listened to the now-familiar conversations. She hastened through the periods when Kane was alone in the pilot’s room.
The Hunter team talked about what they hoped to find in the Golden Pitcher. The Dream.
Nothing else mattered.
Tripley’s recurrent assertions, “We’re going to do it this time, Markis; I know it,” took on special poignancy.
She saw again Kane’s infatuation with Emily. And hers with him.
She watched moodily, not expecting the record to deviate from the one she remembered until Hunter arrived off Alnitak. And probably even then it would not happen until just before they encountered the celestial. She was wrong.
It was almost three A.M. on day six when Kane, wearing a robe, appeared in the pilot’s room with a cup of coffee. He sat down, checked his instruments, looked at the time, and activated his harness. “Okay, everybody, buckle in.”
Voices broke in over the intercom.
Yoshi: “Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
Emily: “We have a surprise for you.”
Yoshi: “In the middle of the night?”
Tripley: “Yes. It’s worth it.”
Yoshi: “So what is it? Markis, what are we doing?”
Kim froze the picture, sat back in her chair, and stared at Kane’s image in the glow of his instruments. In the doctored version, this hadn’t happened.
No surprises for Yoshi.
And she knew now why Walt Gaerhard, the Interstellar technician, had been reluctant to talk about the jump engine repairs to which he’d signed his name.
There had been no repairs.
There’d been no damage.
28
We value Truth, not because we are principled, but because we are curious. We like to believe we will not tolerate manipulation of the facts. But strict knowledge of what has occurred often inflicts more damage than benefit. Mystery and mythology are safer avenues of pursuit precisely because they are open to manipulation. Truth, ladies and gentlemen, is overrated.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” It was Yoshi’s voice. But only Kane was visible, relaxed in his chair. He was looking off to his right, gazing out beyond the view of the imager. Kim, recalling the design of the Hunter, knew he was looking through large double windows. The overhead screen depicted the Alnitak region, the vast roiling clouds, the dark mass of the Horsehead, the brilliant nebulosity NGC2024, the giant star itself, and the sweeping rings of the Jovian world.
“We thought you’d not want to miss it.” Emily this time. “There’s nothing quite like it anywhere we’ve been.”
She came into the picture now and sat down in the left-hand chair. “I think,” she said, “we should have dinner tonight out on one of the terraces.”
“Precisely what we had in mind.” That was Tripley. Kim judged from the body language of Emily and Kane that their colleagues were not physically present in the pilot’s room. “In fact, we’ve made it a tradition to do that whenever we’ve been out here.”
Something on the control board caught Kane’s eye. He made adjustments, looked at his screens, and frowned. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“What is it, Markis?” asked Tripley’s voice.
“I don’t know. We’re getting a return—”
“What kind of return?”
“Metal. Moving almost perpendicular to the plane of the system.”
Emily leaned forward to get a better look at the screen. “Is that significant? I wouldn’t think a chunk of iron’s that much out of the ordinary.”
“This one appears to have some definition.” After a pause: “But don’t get excited. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Nevertheless, Emily’s face took on an aura of hope.
“Markis.” Tripley again.
“It’s on your monitor now, Kile. We’re still too far away to make anything of it.”
“You think it might be an artificial object?”
“I think it’s a chunk of iron.” He pressed a key on the control panel. “So everybody knows,” he said, “the Foundation requires us in any unusual circumstance to record everything that happens throughout the ship until we resolve the situation. Save for private quarters, of course. We will go to full recording mode in one minute. So get your clothes on back there, kiddies.”
“Can we get a picture of the thing?” asked Yoshi.
“It’s still too far away.”
“How far is that?”
“Seven hundred thousand kay. It’s in orbit, about to drift behind the planet. We’ll lose it in a few minutes.”
“Not altogether, I hope,” said Emily.
“No chance,” said Kane. They watched it drop down the sky, disappearing finally behind the rim of the big planet.
“Kile, I assume we want to take a closer look?”
Tripley laughed. “Sure. Why not, as long as we’re here?”
“How long before we see it again?” asked Yoshi.
“Don’t know. We didn’t get enough to plot an orbit.”
“Just stay with it,” said Tripley.
“All right.” Kane gave directions to the AI. “If we’re going to pursue we should get rolling. Everybody belt down.” Hunter rotated, realigned itself, and the mains fired.